The Curious Case of the Solar System's Missing Asteroids, Solved

They got too close to the sun.

A group of astronomers perplexed by missing asteroids in the central region of the solar system believe they figured out what happened.

The team originally set out to create an improved model of NEOs, or near-Earth objects, using observations of the known 9,000 NEOs. But the astronomers discovered a discrepancy between their model and data collected from the Catalina Sky Survey, some 100,000 images of NEOs taken over the course of eight years. There were far fewer NEOs than their model would have predicted. Where did they all go?

Jim Festante is an actor/writer in Los Angeles and regular video contributor to Slate. He is the author of the Image Comics miniseries The End Times of Bram and Ben.